Real cost of violence on screen

One image shows a tiny, vulnerable baby moments after it was rescued from the Beslan school siege in which 331 people died. The other shows a dog lying on a carpet, starved to death. Ask a teenager which is the most shocking of the two and they will tell you it is the dead dog. So desensitised to images of violence are adolescents that they find animal cruelty more distressing than human suffering, according to university researchers. Images depicting violence against humans are commonplace and delivered to children every day by the internet, television and computer games. Gore and human suffering fail to shock, but animal cruelty does.

Lesley Murphy, a lecturer at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, has been investigating the effects still images in the media have on teenagers for her PhD. She has discovered that teenagers are not easily shocked, and often have a neutral reaction to pictures of extreme violence or suffering. Her findings confirm what has long been suspected – that exposure to violent imagery does deeply affect the young. More than 500 pupils from eight schools in Aberdeenshire took part in her study, which involved looking at 20 images from daily newspapers. After viewing the pictures the children, who were all aged between 12 and 18, filled in questionnaires detailing their emotional responses to each image. "It would appear that graphic or sensational imagery designed for shock impact such as depictions of dead bodies, body parts, injuries, blood and violence do not have much effect," she said. "While the pupils often registered the obvious sadness or anger, it was just as likely the pictures provoked boredom and lack of interest." One of the strongest reactions was provoked by a photograph of a dead dog which featured on a poster campaign produced by the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Most of the teenagers found the image distressing and disturbing, much more so than pictures of human suffering. Ms Murphy said: "I think this has to do with their age, and the relationship adolescents have with vulnerable animals and pets. "If a group of mothers had been shown the images, they would have been far more shocked by depictions of cruelty to children than animals and I think the Beslan picture would have had a bigger impact."

Ms Murphy said that although the graphic images on the whole failed to shock the adolescents, it did not follow that they lacked empathy or understanding. She said: "They really do care about what is happening in the world, and they care about the events such as the tsunami and the Iraq conflict, but the images just don't shock them. "One of the typical responses to the images was that they didn't show anything they hadn't seen before. "It came across very strongly that these children have become desensitised through constant exposure to images of death and violence. Many of them said they can still be saddened by images, but are not shocked. Television, the internet, and even computer games have played a part in the desensitising of young people."

After analysing the results, Ms Murphy found that age, gender, educational ability and ethnicity appeared to have little effect on the responses of the adolescents. The only significant variable which appeared to impact the data was the positive or negative language of the teacher who brought the adolescents to the exhibitions. While the study suggests that exposure to graphic material inures children to depictions of violence, it has also been claimed that it can, in extreme cases, affect their behaviour.

In a paper published in the Lancet last year, researchers from the University of Birmingham claimed that violent images on television and computer games can increase aggressive behaviour among children. Earlier this year Thomas Waddell, the teenager from Glasgow who raped and killed a young mother, claimed he had a dangerous fixation with violent computer games which had affected his grip on reality. One study has shown that a quarter of young murderers in the UK had spent hours every day playing violent computer games and another conducted by the London School of Economics found there was a link between computer games and violence in younger people. In recent years police officers, psychiatrists and lawyers have noticed an increase in the number of young offenders who have claimed their behaviour was influenced by violent computer games.

Calum MacDonald
10 May 2006

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